The use of hand held devices for optical character recognition (OCR) has many applications in industry, but the nature of OCR requires that the read distance be consistent and that the angle of incidence be minimal (read head close to perpendicular is preferred with slight adjustments made to reduce reflected light). Since in postal applications, most regions of interest will be on the top surface of the item, the manual operation of a standard handheld device would require potentially awkward repetitive motion of the operator and read problems could occur if the height and angle of incidence are not within the appropriate range for the OCR scanner. A hand held device is convenient for reading a wide variety of item sizes and shapes, but the acceptable read rate is reliant on the accuracy of positioning of the device by the operator. The present invention relates to an OCR device that can overcome these problems while retaining most of the flexibility of a hand held scanner.